USB-To-Serial Adapter
Jumpers
Breadboard & power supply
To prototype your circuit quickly a breadboard is the perfect tool. It is helpful to have different sizes ready: the tiny ones with about 15 rows are good as switchboard for jumpers. The bigger ones like the one in the kit suggested below have space for two power rails and can take also
The ESP8266
While there are many different versions of ESP8266 available you should pick one that has as many pins available as possible. You should make sure that the analog-digital-converter is available and the 10 GPIO pins.So far I only tested this test board and wrote a review here:
But there are other good candidates around, which I ordered but didn’t arrive.
The board designed by the NodeMCU makers seems to be very convenient since it comes with a serial-to-usb connector already on the board and because the pins fit into a breadboard but with $15.- it is also a lot pricier than the previous testboard. I’ll let you know once it arrives… The hardware is actually open-source and the gerber files are available on github.
The following board is only third of the price of the NodeMCU module and is also breadboard friendly:
ESP8266 DevKit
You might also do well with one of the available starter kits. The following one comes with a ESP01 module which has only two GPIO pins and no ADC available. But you get all you need in one package.
What’s next?
In one of the next posts I would like to show you what you can do with the ESP modules once all components have arrived… Stay tuned!